After having examined the affordances of computers, software, and the Internet, this chapter will show how appropriation and design evolve in the extended culture industry. As described in the preveious chapter, the design of software or electronic consumer goods is ambivalent in either stimulating or repressing certain practices. Using two sets of cases, this chapter encourages a perception of participatory culture as a heterogeneous constellation of different participants, either professionals or amateurs, whose activities are deeply intertwined. It furthermore argues for an understanding of participatory culture as a hybrid constellation of information technology and large user numbers interacting in a socio-technical ecosystem. A clear distinction in the resulting labour cannot be made between user and machine-created aspects, instead it has to be accepted as having been co-constructed by both. The first set of cases examines to what extent software-based products can be used in ways not anticipated by their original designers. It furthermore shows that business models can contradict the basic affordances of an artefact and provoke user appropriation to uncloak the device's extended but vendor-limited potential. These user activities qualify for explicit participation in the design process of electronic consumer goods. The second set of cases shows to what extent user activities can be integrated into software design, thereby stimulating the use of software applications, lowering the bar for participation, and creating platforms for user-created content. In this case, user activities manifest themselves implicitly as forms of participation.

Furthermore, this chapter argues that participation extends production and distribution into the domain of audiences and users. As Henry Jenkins extensively argues, many users accumulate and modify corporate media texts. Despite the fact that user and producer blur in intertwined production processes, their specific role either as user or as producer must be defined with respect to the production process, institutional context, legal framing through licenses and copyrights, and their particular relations to companies and user communities. These complex and dynamic connections in explicit participation can be clearly recognized in the analysis of three selected cases of hardware modification.

The case of the modification of the Microsoft Xbox and the leaking of the Xbox Development Kit (XDK) demonstrates how users appropriate corporate design and to what extent the basic affordances of the Xbox have even provoked this appropriation.